Love Poem for an Apocalypse - Dave Lucas

[Lawrence Robinson]

Love Poem for an Apocalypse

I wish I’d met you after everything had burned,
after the markets crash and global sea levels rise.
The forests scorched. The grasslands trespassed.
My love, it is a whole life’s work to disappear—
ask the god with his head in the wolf’s mouth or
the serpent intent on swallowing all the earth.
Ask the senate subcommittee for market solutions
for late capitalism and early-onset dementia.
You and a bird flu could make me believe in fate.
I think we might be happy in the end, in the dark
of a hollow tree, a seed bank or blast-proof bunker,
if only you would sing the song I love, you know
the one about our precious eschatology, the one
I always ask to hear to lull me back to sleep.

	- Dave Lucas